Could the next frontier be a robotic tongue that can tell taste, bringing robots one step closer to being human? Here I am being pretty naive in thinking that all robots are able to taste would be the different grades of motor oil. Guess I am wrong here, as researchers have managed to cobble together a magnetic tongue which is able to detect tomatoes through “taste”. Digital taste, perhaps chefs around the world might want to employ a far more advanced version down the road in order for their dishes to be more consistent.
The research team behind this magnetic tongue was looking for a method to quantify detailed sensory descriptions, hence their foray into using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in order to analyze taste without the need for any additional chemical analysis. NMR is able to tell the difference based on the chemical composition of a sample, and 18 canned tomato products were used in the experiment. What next on the cooking front?
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